Product details

This much anticipated release features among other works the
Fanfare for a new dome. Very few Melbourne buildings
have been honoured with their own personally written fanfare.
However, Composer George Dreyfus has been fortunate enough to pen
not just one fanfare but two of these celebratory pieces. The
first fanfare was to mark the opening of the National Gallery of
Victoria's Great Hall in 1968 and the second was to herald the
opening of the restored Domed Reading Room of the State Library
of Victoria in 2003. George refers to a concept Giovanni Gabrieli
and Heinrich Schutz devised when they wrote the fanfares for the
opening of St Mark's Cathedral in Venice. "A fanfare has to be
very direct and simple. If it's too complex you can't follow it
around the space" The architectural design of the Domed Reading
Room was a key element of his composition and allowed him to
position brass instrumentalists in the reading room's four
separate galleries, ensuring the audience would turn and follow
the sounds - a bit like being at the tennis!

Film maker Tim Burstall gave George Dreyfus his very first film
job, the Adventures of Sebastian the Fox in 1963, twenty three
years later, in 1986, they were still working together, this time
on Tim's fantasy version for ABC Television of Charles Dickens'
masterpiece, Great Expectations, which freely developed
Madgwick's adventures in Australia. In particular, the series
starred Sigrid Thornton, who, as George states, is much more
famous now than Burstall and Dreyfus put together.

This disc also features Hallelujah for Handel and Larino Safe
Haven, After the chart-stopping success of Rush in 1974; Dreyfus
was asked to write the music for the ABC Television series Power
without Glory, based on Frank Hardy's great Australian classic.
Here is a quotation from George's biography, The Last Frivolous
Book:

"There was a great debate about whether or not I should use
'music of the day'. It was the time of Hollywood's remake of that
marvellous novel, Day of the Locusts, which certainly used 'music
of the day'. So I thought I'd use music of the Power without
Glory days, which meant starting in the 1890s. I rang historian
Geoffrey Blainey and asked him: "If you were living in Sackville
Street, Collingwood, parallel to Johnson Street - where the tote
was in 1890, what music do you reckon you would have heard?" He
said people wouldn't have heard any. They wouldn't have had the
money to go into town and hear concerts. Although John West and
is mates were Catholics, the only music they would have heard
would have been Salvation Army bands. "What d'you reckon?" I
asked the ABC. "Fine" they said. So I went back to Geoffrey.
"What would the Salvation Army bands have played?" "I don't
know," he replied, "but my dad's still alive and he's ninety, and
he reckons they would have played the march from Scipio and See,
the Conquering Hero Comes from Judas Maccabaeus". So I started.
First, I combined the melodic line of one piece with the bass
line of the other. Then I contacted a Salvation Army band and got
to know Colin Woods, the bandmaster, and borrowed from him the
oldest bandbook he had. It was one of those little books that
they pin up on their cornets. Then I got him to record a few
hymns. I took a tape recorder into the Citadel (as they call
their church buildings) and they spent some time putting things
down for me. Then I wrote my theme for Power without Glory and it
was a fusion of those two Handel pieces plus some up-tempoed
hymns, and one other piece that I felt Melbourne folk of that
time must have heard. It was Valentine's aria, Bravest Hearts
from the most popular opera of the day, Gounod's Faust. One of
the greats in Melbourne Brass Band history, the late Merv
Simpson, recorded my freshly composed Power without Glory theme
music with a super group of professional bandsmen at the Robert
Blackwood Hall and I took the tape down to the ABC Ripponlea
studios and played it to them. They thought it was all wrong.
Why? It was NOT the Theme from Rush!
Over the next week-end I quickly wrote and recorded a new Power
without Glory theme for normal symphony orchestra. But never one
to waste anything, I recycled the brass band version by just
sticking the new title of Hallelujah for Handel on the old brass
band parts and have been performing it at my brass band concerts
ever since"

George Dreyfus... and I hope that you enjoy the
music

Larino, Safe Haven; In July 1939 George Dreyfus, his brother
Richard and a group of fifteen other German-Jewish children,
arrived in Melbourne. They were children whose parents were
thought to have little chance of getting away from the
ever-worsening, even life-threatening, persecution of Nazi
Germany. The children were sponsored by the Australian Jewish
Welfare Society and were accommodated in a large house, 'Larino'
at the corner of Whitehorse Road and Maleela Avenue in the suburb
of Balwyn. After the war the children were dispersed, some to
distant parts of the world. To mark the 50th anniversary of their
arrival in Melbourne, a reunion dinner was held on the 22nd July
1989, and when requested by the host, Dreyfus provided some
dinner music to go with the occasion. The melody was actually the
one written for the innocent scene in the television series
Descant for Gossips made by Tim Burstall for the ABC in 1983,
where young Vinny is given a dink on the bike by her friend Tommy
Peters.